BMW Motorcycles Navigator Adventure GPS

September 11, 2013

By David J. Negron Jr.

You never know where you are going until you get there, but the new Motorrad Navigator Adventure GPS can help.

As a familiar user of Garmin GPS products, I found this new unit a perfect addition to my BMW GS1200 motorcycle. At first glance, the newly designed unit has a sleek narrow elongated housing that doesn’t compromise when it comes to the 4-inch touchscreen display.

The unit is durable, waterproof and fuel resistant and has three anti-reflective protective films for the display. With the additional mounting bracket and snap-in electrical, this was a seamless installation.

Upon initial powering up of the unit, it goes through its stages of satellite acquisitions and then pinpoints your location within a few minutes (faster than previous units, I found). I went through a few set up features and the unit was ready.

To accommodate my 50-year old eyes (150 reading magnification), I made a couple of font size setting adjustments and from my helmet to the unit I could read the display clear as day.

I took the BMW Motorrad Navigator Adventure GPS for a test-ride from Los Angeles to the Johnston Valley OHV area in southern California. Setting destination with the GPS software was a breeze with easy paths through destination selections. The freeway road maps and landscape orientation of the unit were visually clear at a quick glance and it provided prompts before every upcoming turn, and I love the little moto-dude icon.

On the OHV side, I was pleasantly surprised with the brightness of the on-screen display in bright sunlight. Dirt-fire-roads were all visible as the terrain changed and I headed off-road. Even through the densest of forest and canyon hillsides, the unit held its position and I never felt abandoned.

The unit was wired into the bike’s power support, but once I removed the unit, the internal lithium-ion battery kicked in. Away from a power source, the unique dual-battery system (lithium-ion/AA batteries), held the unit alive with its impressive battery life of 18 hours.

There is also new user intuitiveness built into the software that can be used to customize the features for easy access. With its micro-SD cards, additional map data like topographic for single track riding can be uploaded from electronic maps for precision geo-referencing. This is handy with the customizable access frequency for shortcut commands and quick changing from one screen to another. If geocaching is your thing, you can transfer GPX files directly to the Navigator and all the descriptions can be read directly on the display.

The unit comes with preinstalled map data for North America –nuMaps Lifetime that have free updates for the lifespan of the device (which could be quite long since my Garmin 276c GPS is still working!).

Overall, I was very impressed with the new Navigator Adventure GPS and know that my travels will always return me to a place somewhere in the world called home.